Although you can enjoy much of this website without javascript, we highly recommend that you enable it in order to experience all available features.

Cookies on What Doctors Don't Tell You

We set cookies so you can manage your account and navigate the site, and to remember your cookie preferences so that you don't keep getting this message. To accept cookies, just keep browsing,
otherwise use the links on the right to adjust your cookie settings or find out more.

Mercury fillings face Europe-wide ban

About the author:&nbsp

Dentists across Europe will stop using amalgam fillings—which contain mercury—in pregnant and nursing women and children under the age of 15 in 2018. The ban, which affects dentists in all the 28 member-countries of the EU, comes into effect in July next year.

The ban needs to be officially ratified, but this is expected to be a formality as the European Commission, the European Council and the European Parliament have already agreed to it.

Health agencies in each of the member countries must also submit plans as to how they will be reducing the use of amalgam fillings in the rest of the population by 2019.

The edict is a triumph for consumer groups who have played a major role in the six-year consultation period—and a blow to the dental associations that still maintain that amalgam fillings are safe.

Groups such as the World Alliance for Mercury-Free Dentistry predict the ruling marks the beginning of the end for amalgam fillings across the developed world.

Amalgam fillings—which are a mix of silver, tin and copper in liquid, or elemental, mercury—have been used by dentists for more than 150 years because the material is inexpensive and pliable.

Dental associations have maintained the mercury—which makes up around half the filling—is locked in, and can’t escape.

But, as WDDTY revealed last month (http://www.wddty.com/magazine/2016/december/the-secret-life-of-your-fillings.html) the mercury does escape, and can damage our brain, heart, kidneys, lungs and immune system—because our gut converts the elemental mercury into methyl mercury, its most lethal form.